Unlit: Natural Light Cinematography

Spoiler: Silhouette Everything

One of the biggest hurdles in no-budget filmmaking is kit, meaning lighting, or a dolly, or whatever else.
There’s never enough time or space to use the kit if we had it, and to make things worse, we don’t have it.

This means a lot of no-budget films show their limitations: large, flat white walls, bland front-lighting, or mixing blue daylight and orange light bulbs in a murky, unappealing way.

A still from my film Abigail: starring a bland, featureless white wall.

This isn’t so much an aesthetic choice as a forced compromise. It’s true that stellar cinematography with long dramatic camera moves won’t make a scene great by itself, it has to be there with the actors and the script. That being said, cinematography is still HUGELY important to the final impact, and some simple contrast and silhouettes can make a huge difference in making the final result appealing, and even astounding, to look at, regardless of gear.

Same movie, but shot months later than the other image: silhouettes are a filmmakers best friend.

So what’s the process?

For interiors, we start with the room: are there any windows? Does it have any interesting light fixtures?
Is there a best time of day to shoot? Can we shoot it then?

Outside, it’s a matter of where is the sun or ambient light coming from? How long do we have it? Can we shoot at golden hour or fake golden hour? Would it work better at high noon?

These questions help to give you an idea of how to tackle the scene aesthetically. Ideally, doing so quickly so you can focus on the other 14 jobs a zero-budget filmmaker has on set.

For Mockingbird, my aunt let us use her one-floor apartment for 8 hours to shoot three semi-large scenes.

• I had never been to her apartment, and as such there was no blocking for any of the scenes.
• My actresses knew their dialogue, but had only run through it together once or twice before.
• The time was ticking, and we had a hard exit time, regardless of whether or not we were done shooting.

This meant the majority of our limited time had to be spent working on the scene, not nailing a hair light or moving gear.
The apartment has huge floor-to-ceiling windows, this was a huge boon since we could see everything we needed to without having to boost ISO, however this also meant whenever a cloud went in front of the sun, we lost about 3–4 stops of light in a second.

These are two images from those scenes, both lit up entirely* by those nearby windows

*the image on the right does have a hair light on the back of our actress’s head (Mackenzie Barmen), which is from a small battery operated LED light being held by my tall-ass brother. Everything else is lit by the windows.

Using the ambient light from the room and moving my actresses around throughout the different scenes helps keep the environment from becoming stale, and using the time of day changes over our shoot to our advantage became necessary to give different scenes (that took place across multiple days) a different feeling.

Shot between 2pm-3pm, the sun was now over the house, and we had a much more diffuse bounce from the trees outside. Very green, also ungraded.

The idea of being in-and-out quickly is one that permeates just about every film, regardless of budget. It’s hard to maximize time in a space when you’re spending 1–3 hours setting up a shot, vs using simpler methods such as tripod or handheld to keep the movements (or lack thereof) relatively simple.

On our first day of filming we had access to a location for two hours, and had five pages to shoot.
This meant set ups had to be fast, and have maximum impact per-shot to justify not moving the camera for so long.

We had the same luck with large windows, and even better luck with a relatively stable light level outside, plus the excellent chemistry between my actresses who had been in acting class together, meant that all I had to do was line up my shot, hope the SD card didn’t fail (it didn’t), and watch.

These are images from that scene.

Including the shots seen here, there were six set ups including inserts. Only one shot, a master, was entirely thrown out in the editing of the three-minute scene.

By relying on natural light you can often find yourself painted into a corner, often at the whim of whatever the weather happens to be doing, but by embracing the nature of *ahem* nature, you may often find more impactful images than could have been planned.

I’m a wedding photographer and have been a pre-school photographer, and that sort of job experience is excellent for seeing an opportunity and taking it quickly. Weddings especially are also great exercises in using available light, and there is almost NEVER enough.

The best part about filmmaking is that you can call cut, reset, and do it again, meaning that you don’t have to be able to control the clouds and sun, just your actors and camera. If all else fails, run it again.

One of the biggest examples of this of embracing whatever nature is going to throw at you is the opening of the film. It was plotted as a vibrant, blazing orange sunset the gives way to the bluish-murk of twilight.

It ended up raining.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the scene is dark and a dim drizzling atmosphere could work wonders for the themes. I do have a bit of an ace up my sleeve, if a 22 year old can still say that, in that I’ve shot there before. It was the location I used for a third of my previous film, and in several of my photo gigs.

All of these were shot within a 10ft radius of each other.

It’s a versatile, reasonably private spot that makes it great for filming, and is drop dead gorgeous to boot. The flat gray day ended up being just versatile enough that I could push my look in post to get it how Iwanted it.

A cloudy gray day leads to a lot of very flat lighting to manipulate in post.

The experience having shot at the location previously certainly helped, but by using the principal of using silhouettes and dramatic lighting cues where I can, it helps disguise that it was shot in 60 minutes with a very excited 4 year old and his sister who was running around just off-screen.

It was also shot for no money, as with everything I’ve shot so far, and by a camera that came out in 2011 (that would have been cutting edge if it had launched in 2007.) The point is to say that what we plan for and what we actually get are two different things, and we have to be prepared to throw the plan into the trash on a moments notice if it becomes useless.

There are dozens of stories about a massive complication making movies better in the long run (Marlon Brando being a complete douche during Apocalypse Now), and hundreds where the filmmakers didn’t change the plan, and the movie suffered.
The whole time I was shooting, things were changing. Each day we had a different location, different shooting conditions, and different levels of tolerance as the work days piled on themselves.

But we got it done, and more importantly we got it done well. The longest portion so far has been post-production, with some scenes yet to be shot, and some yet to be written. But that’s another story for another time.

Martin R. McGowan is a filmmaker living in Aston, Pa.
He enjoys long walks in Hyrule and ignoring his responsibilities.
When not stressing, he can be found asleep, or pretending to sleep as the world around him may or may not be crumbling.

I can also be found on Instagram, and building a YouTube channel, about five years late to that party.